Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-29-Speech-3-023"
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"en.20061129.9.3-023"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Ahern, it was with some excitement that I listened to your speech. I think we have reached a point that could easily be defined as the ‘point of no future’ if we were working on the basis of ‘business as usual’.
While Mr Ahern was quite clear in making the future of Europe dependent on what becomes of a constitutional treaty for the European Union, that does, however, presuppose that there has to be a long-term discussion process with that Union’s citizens. There are more reasons than those already – and repeatedly – adduced for why people are afraid that this European Union will be unable to offer them a future.
I do not see the text as submitted as providing any answers to a dichotomy that is, alas, all too often put to one side, for, although we have defined what wealth has been brought into this European Union of ours by way of every kind of people and nation – namely their highly diverse cultural identities – we have not, however, managed to define what we, together, are going to do with all this wealth. It is one thing to ask what we bring with us, but considering what we are to do with it, how a shared political identity can be fashioned out of it, is a process that cannot be run as a sideline and certainly not on the basis of people being told the same thing over and over again, that being that they have not yet understood what good we are trying to do.
That is why I think that we have to take on board people’s day-to-day experiences of the European Union and make actual policies that have to do with their future and their present, on the basis of them. This is particularly true in relation to the issue of a social European Union, the neglect of which to date has been positively criminal. There is, in fact, no point in us discussing this or that while people experience the precise opposite, as we have seen from the debate in Brussels about the Volkswagen workers, and in assorted other areas too. The unfortunate fact is that, in the day-to-day lives of many, the European Union's presence is felt in the shape of decreasing job security and less social security, and that is not going to get people engaging with these processes and affirming their belief in them, even though that is precisely what we need, and I think we should have more discussion of how we create the conditions in which cultural identities can develop into shared political identities and into a civic identity for the European Union."@en1
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